Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Well, don’t just stand there, folks,” the Chief growled. “Look alive! How are you going to judge a beauty pageant with your eyes shut?”

This was how Dad was raising money for Carnival Darwinism?

The humans who answered his dad’s summons were sad quarry, Kiwi thought — pervy-looking old guys or catatonic gamblers, men with nothing else to lose tonight. The faces he saw under the lights were grim with an insuperable boredom, or in a kind of dreamy agony. One man with a tight, bloated face kept shuffling at his crotch in full sight of everyone.

Vijay and Leo did not join the huddle. They were busy chatting up two old women, two gargoyles in flowery pantsuits near the roulette wheel, hoping to find “female patrons” to support their gambling. They had a little routine, which they’d explained to Kiwi in the car. “The pitch.” It didn’t sound particularly sophisticated. The plan seemed to involve (1) talking to older ladies, (2) listening to older ladies, (3) asking older ladies for one hundred dollars. In denominations of twenty, if possible.

Vijay and Leo were working hard; Leo had a grin stuccoed to his face, and Vijay kept throwing his head back in a spectacularly phony laugh. Neither of them seemed to have noticed the white man behind the microphone. An aging Bigtree Indian with knotty hands and purple bags beneath his eyes whose face looked — if you really looked — exactly like the face of their friend Kiwi.

What were these women — strippers? dancers? Kiwi wasn’t sure what to call them but they seemed underwardrobed for air-conditioning. They were all lined up for the pageant. They scintillated in a sort of depressing, fish-market way. A brunette with a jowly, friendly face walked out first. Bouncing Bella. She guffawed for some reason when the Chief called her onto the stage, as if her name were a complicated joke that she had at last understood. A redhead in a padded bra that looked like it was made from an extinct species of hot-pink Texan snake kept sneezing. The Chief held the microphone in his huge grip and ladled his compliments over each of them, as if he were trying to clothe them in words.

Easily it was the saddest pageant that Kiwi had ever seen.

“Okay!” The Chief cleared his throat. “Let’s get those ballots in, gentlemen …”

Does my dad do this every night? Kiwi wondered. Only Tuesdays? The Chief was the proudest man who Kiwi had ever met. How had he survived a job, any Loomis job, for so long?

The Chief started using phrases Kiwi recognized from Hilola Bigtree’s show:

“Did you forget that they made women like this, folks …?”

“Now, believe me, this girl has got more talent in her pinkie finger … ”

A few things were making sense now, in the scarlet hue of this event. It would appear — it would make sense, timewise — that Kiwi’s dad had been working two jobs for quite some time. Years, possibly. Which life did the Chief keep a secret from whom? Kiwi wondered. It seemed unlikely that these mainlanders knew his father as Chief Bigtree of Swamplandia! For a second, trying to assimilate this fact, Kiwi felt his whole childhood turn translucent.

So: the Chief’s “business trips” had been to this casino, or perhaps to equally shitty places of employ in Loomis County.

Kiwi’s mother used to describe the business trips to her children as “Sam’s ventures” in respectful, careful tones. Dark and sparkling tones — that was Hilola Bigtree, monologuing about her husband. Whenever one parent talked to him about the other one, Kiwi got the uneasy feeling that he didn’t know either person at all.

“Oh, your father is meeting with the investors, honey. ‘Investors’ are mainlanders who pay us more money than any one tourist. They are big fans of our show.”

As Kiwi got older and angrier, his mother would reveal a little more: “Your father is doing hard work for us on the mainland. He gets lonely in that hotel room. He wishes he were here on the island, believe me. I know you miss him, Kiwi,” she’d add. “I know you love your father.”

By the end, she seemed to say “I know you …” out of a deep anxiety for the future that she wouldn’t get to oversee, the same way she begged: “I know you’re wearing deodorant” or “I know you’re practicing with the Seths” or “I know you’ll take good care of your sisters, Kiwi.”

“Brush your teeth, son!” she’d screamed at him once from her hospital bed, nine days before her death. “You’re not brushing, are you …?” and the pleading and suspicion in her voice belied the stupidity of this accusation. She was all doped with morphine.

“Mom, I’m seventeen,” he’d said quietly. And then, when he saw what her face did, “Thank you for reminding me, Ma. I’ll keep brushing.”

All his mom’s requests had become huge and tragic at the end of her life, like magnificent tropical flowers at the suicidal peak of their blooming. Kiwi was studying them, the angiosperms of tropical systems, for a future test that Kiwi planned to give and take. Perhaps he would be a horticulturist. As a genius, your career options abounded, and with his background he was set: horticulture, herpetology, oncology, radiology, the mortuary arts, museum sciences, he pretty much had his pick.

After her cancer was diagnosed, all business trips had stopped.

Always Kiwi had viewed his parents as coconspirators, confabulators. But Kiwi had assumed the conspiracy part was Swamplandia! — all that bullshit about the island and the Seths and their “Bigtree tribe.” He hadn’t guessed that a bigger, sadder secret existed on the shore, a backstage to their family’s story way out here in Loomis County. Carnival Darwinism seemed more impossible than ever before, now that Kiwi understood how the Chief had planned to fund it.

Onstage, the Chief was handing the Queen of Beauty a metal crown and a fountain of white carnations. His bum leg stuttered on the carpet.

“Another winner!”

“Another winner!”

“Another winner!”

A golden-toned computerized voice announced this good tiding over and over while somewhere nearby metal rained into a pan.

“Hey, Bigtree!”

Kiwi started. Leo showed up swinging a bottle of beer in each hand.

“There you are, bro … Are you watching this? Fucking unbelievable, right?”

He rolled his eyes toward the stage. There was something puppyish about the conflict on Leo’s face. He was clearly torn between his first impulse toward wonderment, a panting and ignorant enjoyment, and his obedience to their pack of three. You weren’t supposed to enjoy a spectacle like this.

“What I mean is, it’s sort of gross. Pathetic. These bitches are old . The whole thing’s retarded. What if that was, like, your mom?”

Then Leo made a joke about Vijay’s mother, an analogy that compared her to the Lucky-U-Can’t-Lose Slot Machine. Leo’s mother’s vagina was alleged by Vijay to be wide as a bus. Punching commenced.

“You guys? You’re going to get us kicked out of here,” Kiwi mumbled. Across the room his dad had started to cough. The Chief had an instinct for professionalism: when his coughing fit began he switched off the microphone. From the shadows, Kiwi watched his father’s silent convulsions.

A thickset man in jeans and a knotted red bandanna was approaching his dad’s table; he leaned in and thumped the Chief between his shoulder bones — too hard, Kiwi thought. The man had a skinny ponytail that jumped against the small of his back with each step, as if this guy thought he was a mobile rodeo. My dad’s boss , Kiwi realized with something like horror. He watched his father’s head tilt forward a fraction of an inch, as if in prayer. This was a humility that Kiwi had become familiar with, via Carl.